How to Write a Novel in 411 Days

The idea for No One Knows Us Here was spinning around my head for years before I actually sat down to write it. I was waiting for inspiration to strike. It had happened to me before—a sudden burst of creativity would come over me and I would write like a Serious Author character in a movie, typing furiously, cranking out page after page deep into the night.

When I was younger, I would get overtaken by these bursts of creativity fairly often. Now that I was older and wiser, inspiration was nowhere to be found. Worried, I tried doing a bit of research on the topic. What is inspiration, exactly? Where does it come from, and how can I find it? This research lasted for several months, and in the process I tried everything from guided meditation to astral projection to hypnagogic writing (hey, it worked for Mary Shelley) to Dreamstorming, a writing technique advocated by Robert Olen Butler in his book From Where You Dream. After all this, I am not sure how “inspired” I got, but I did manage to distract myself from actually working on my manuscript for a couple more months.

When I tried to learn how other writers deal with writer’s block, I began to note a disturbing trend. They didn’t seem to believe in inspiration. “Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!” Henry Miller said. Or here’s Neil Gaiman: “This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it’s done. It’s that easy, and that hard.” In other words, just do it. Don’t wait around for inspiration.

Well. I did not like the sound of that. It wasn’t very cinematic, for one. Who wants to watch a movie where the writer sits down at a computer and slowly taps on a keyboard? Stares at the screen. Deletes something. Types half a sentence. Falls asleep, hypnotized by the blinking cursor.

It just didn’t seem like it would work for me, but I vowed to try it for thirty days straight, as an experiment. For thirty days, I would set the timer for one hour and work on my manuscript. Why an hour? An hour is long enough to get something done, but not so long that I could conceivably claim to be too busy or unable to carve out the time. I had tried all sorts of things in the past to stick with a writing routine, and none of them had worked. “Just open the document every day” (in an attempt to overcome that first and most daunting barrier, getting started) was too vague and insubstantial. “Treat writing like a full time job and do it for eight hours straight” never panned out for obvious reasons. An hour a day, for thirty days: I could at least try it, if only to prove all those other writers wrong.

I tried it. Thirty days later, I’d written almost 20,000 words. Whoa. If I kept writing at that pace, I could have a full draft in about four months. Was it possible that these “just sit in the chair and do it” people knew what they were talking about? I decided to keep the streak going for another thirty days, and then another. In the end, it didn’t take four months. It took 411 days. I wrote for one hour—almost never more than an hour—every single day for 411 days, and at the end of it, I had a first draft. A very messy, overly long (135k-word) first draft, but a first draft. 

Here’s what I learned:

An hour is enough. I thought I’d need a much bigger time commitment to get a draft completed. Back when I could count on inspiration, my novels just wrote themselves. Well, my novels stopped writing themselves and I had to take over, plugging away at it every single day. The funny thing was, I was goofing off at least half the time, too. Getting up to make another cup of tea or go to the bathroom in the middle of my “writing hour.” Sometimes I didn’t write at all—just stared at the screen or noodled around the manuscript with nitpicky edits. I had to keep redefining my rules: no editing, no “research” (wondering what kind of dress my character should wear one minute, creating a Pinterest board for fall fashions the next), no unnecessary breaks, etc. I am obviously very undisciplined and still got a draft done in 411 days.

Streaks are weirdly motivating. For me anyway. Once, I vowed to get 10,000 steps a day and kept up a perfect streak—in sickness and in health, during ice storms and heat waves—for more than two years. There is something about completing a task, checking it off, and then doing it again the next day (and the next and the next) that keeps me going, though I do worry it can border on obsession. Oh well, it’s better not to question it.

Inspiration is not necessary. It’s more fun to write when inspiration strikes, when I feel like I want to write, like I must write. But just sitting down and sticking with something, day after day, gets the job done. I’m still waiting and hoping for inspiration to take over once again … and when it’s ready, it knows where to find me. I’ll be here. Sitting in that chair. Plugging away.

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ABOUT REBECCA KELLEY

Rebecca Kelley is an author and graphic designer whose first novel, Broken Homes and Gardens, was published in 2015. Her second novel, No One Knows Us Here, will be released by Lake Union Publishing in January 2023.  

Rebecca holds a master’s degree in Creative Writing from Portland State University and a BA from Southern Oregon University. She taught writing for 15 years and has written articles for Bustle, The Rumpus, Metro Parent, Scholastic, and Parent and Child. 

When Rebecca isn’t writing, she is conducting elaborate baking experiments, designing book covers, and keeping up her thousand-plus-day streak in Duolingo. She lives in northeast Portland with her husband and daughter. 

Website: https://rebeccakelleywrites.com/

Twitter: @rkelleywrites

Instagram: @rkelleywrites

Facebook: @rkelleywrites

NO ONE KNOWS US HERE

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing